CHICAGO - As Barack Obama celebrated his compelling win in North Carolina and the unexpected closeness of the Indiana race on Tuesday night, his senior strategist said one of the campaign’s top tasks now is to court influential Democratic Party figures.
 
The Democratic senator from Illinois was seen as showing resilience after a bumpy ride in which he has struggled with questions about his former pastor’s fiery sermons and efforts by Clinton to paint him as an “out of touch” elitist.
 
Analysts said his rival Hillary Clinton, who won only narrowly in Indiana where she had been favored to do well, was likely to face increased pressure to exit the race because her showing did little to advance her argument that she would be more electable than Obama in a matchup against Republican Sen. John McCain.
 
Asked by reporters whether there would be a slew of new endorsements from the party stalwarts and officials known as the “superdelegates,” Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, was careful not to reveal too much.
 
“We’re going to be reaching out to them,” Axelrod told reporters as Obama, who would be the first black U.S. president, flew back home to Chicago from his evening rally in North Carolina.
 
The Obama strategist said the message in these conversations would be a simple one: “Read the newspapers.”

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: Reuters/Chris Keane (Obama waves to supporters at his North Carolina and Indiana primary election night rally in Raleigh.)

INDIANAPOLIS - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, seeking to erode rival Hillary Clinton’s edge with blue-collar workers, made a personal pitch for their support on the eve of Tuesday’s Indiana and North Carolina primaries.

“How is everybody?” Obama asked a group of workers in hard hats at a construction site on Monday morning in Evansville, Indiana, where he chatted with them about health care and gasoline costs.

After a town hall session in North Carolina and a big evening rally in Indiana, Obama  stopped by a car parts plant in Indianapolis at midnight to greet workers coming off the night shift. He told them he faced a close race with Clinton and asked for their votes. But Frank Spiceland, 29, a machinist at the plant, which employs 600 Ford Motor Company employees and 600 from Automotive Components Holdings, asked Obama to help save his job.

The factory is scheduled to close in 2010. Many of the Ford employees, such as Spiceland, may be able to transfer to another plant if they want to. Others will be laid off.

“I asked him if he could help keep the plant open as long as possible,” said Spiceland, who added the chance to meet the Illinois senator one-on-one had persuaded him to vote for Obama, even though he was previously undecided.

Clinton’s strong base of support with union workers and other working-class voters helped deliver solid victories to her in the two big industrial states of Ohio and Pennsylvania. She is hoping her strength with that demographic group will boost her chances in Indiana.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

http://www.reuters.com/news/globalcovera ge/2008candidates

Photo credit: Reuters/Jason Reed (Obama greets shift workers at Indianapolis plant)

INDIANAPOLIS - Rock star John Mellencamp played for Hillary Clinton in his home state of Indiana on Saturday, just a few days after he played for her rival, Barack Obama.

“This country’s got to change, and you’re the people who can change it,” he told a crowd of Clinton supporters shivering in an evening chill in White River State Park in Indianapolis.

Mellencamp, an Indiana native who still lives in the state, then launched into “Our Country,” a song often played at Clinton campaign events.

The song begins: “”Well, I can stand beside ideals I think are right, and I can stand beside the idea to stand and fight. I do believe there’s a dream for everyone. This is our country.”

Mellencamp has not endorsed either Clinton or Obama. He played for an Obama campaign event on April 22 in Evansville, Indiana.

The musician, known for his involvement in Farm Aid and his support for U.S. soldiers, campaigned for John Edwards before the former North Carolina senator dropped out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Mellencamp also has spoken out against President George W. Bush and the Iraq war.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage 
 

Photo: Reuters/Jeff Haynes

KEMPTON, Indiana - Barack Obama, vying for support from Hoosiers before Indiana’s Tuesday primary, reconnected with his roots in the state with a visit to a farmhouse owned by his family for generations.
    
The white Victorian home in rural Kempton sits on land owned by Obama’s fourth great-grandfather, who passed it down several generations within the family of Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham. Ann Dunham was from Kansas but she later moved to Hawaii, where Obama was raised.
    
The Kempton farmhouse was built by William Riley Dunham, a great uncle of Obama. After the Dunham family gave it up, it was used at one stage as a funeral home and was recently purchased by Sean Clements, who plans to spruce it.
    
As part of an effort to show a folksier side of the Illinois senator, the campaign planned the visit to the house as an outdoor potluck dinner with Clements and his family and friends.
    
But the weather didn’t cooperate. It was chilly with big gusts of wind that toppled the foldup tables set up in the back yard. So the tables had to be taken down and the dinner was scrapped in favor of a walk-around tour by Obama, his wife, Michelle, and their two daughters, Sasha, 6, and Malia, 9.
    
But there were no shortages of other opportunities to show the “regular guy” side of Obama, who has said he is determined to counter efforts by his opponents to portray him and his wife as “elitist, pointy-headed intellectual types.”
    
The Obamas visited a picnic gathering in Noblesville at lunchtime. In the evening, they stopped by a roller-skating rink for an “ice cream social” with supporters. Obama did not skate, though his daughters did.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage

Photo: Reuters/Jason Reed

CHARLES CITY, Indiana - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama tried on Thursday to win over members of one of his most skeptical audiences: senior citizens.

Those voters have tended to be a strong base for Obama’s rival Hillary Clinton, a former first lady and New York senator. At 60, Clinton is older than the 46-year-old Obama and is seen by many older voters as the more experienced candidate.

Visiting an assisted living center in Indiana, the Illinois senator shared stories about his grandfather’s service in World War II, his grandmother’s frugality and his mother’s battle with cancer.

He also expressed empathy for the daily struggles of older people worried about paying for prescription drugs and health care while trying to get by on a fixed income.

In a proposal that was popular with the group, Obama promised to try to eliminate the income tax on their Social Security benefits.

He also underlined his opposition to a temporary suspension of the federal gasoline tax — an idea proposed by presumptive Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain  and also supported by Clinton.

Obama said the gas tax suspension “isn’t a real solution” because it would provide, at most, only a short-term fix to the energy problem. He also said it would divert money from the fund used to pay for highway repairs.

One questioner mentioned an idea that Clinton has proposed — suspending the gasoline tax and making up the difference for the highway trust fund with a tax on windfall profits of oil companies.

The questioner, an older woman, asked whether a short-term fix to the energy problem was such a bad thing, remarking jokingly that “a lot of us are nothing but short-timers.”

That drew laughter from the group, prompting Obama to say: “You look like you’re going to be around for a while.”

Obama seemed to impress the crowd after a nearly hour-long visit.

Lavera Schroeder, 82, said she found Obama to be a “normal person” who “talked on our terms” and did not use confusing words or jargon that the group would not understand.

“He said his mother tried to get by,” she said. “That’s how we grew up. We ate molasses and home-made bread.”

But Schroeder said she would not be able to vote for Obama in Tuesday’s primary election in Indiana because she had been in the hospital and not had a chance to register.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage

- Photo credit: Reuters/John Gress (Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama campaigns at the CMW specialty metals factory in Indianapolis, Indiana, on April 30)

SOUTH BEND, INDIANA - Sports are a natural metaphor for political campaigns — both have winners and losers, competing teams, and a final score.

In basketball-mad Indiana, Democrat Hillary Clinton held a rally on Indiana University’s basketball court in Bloomington on Friday, while rival Barack Obama played a three-on-three game with supporters later that night.

On Saturday, Clinton headed to South Bend, best known as home to Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish football team. Former president Ronald Reagan, a Republican, laid claim to that franchise long ago, thanks to his portrayal of Irish football player George “the Gipper” Gipp in the 1940 film “Knute Rockne: All American.”

Clinton opted to hold a rally at the city’s minor-league baseball park, where she received a jersey of the home Silver Hawks, a Single A affiliate of the Arizona Diamondbacks.

“We know you’re going to knock it out of the park,” former Gov. Joe Kernan told Clinton in his opening remarks.

When Clinton came to bat, here’s what she said:

“We’re going to hit some of those balls out this stadium and out of our country stadium because we’re going to go to bat and fix America together.”

“We are going to go fight for America, we’re going to round the bases, we’re going to score a lot of runs and we’re going to feel really good about the home team, the American team, the team we’re all a part of,” she continued.

A rocky first inning. But Clinton handled the next eight innings of her stump speech smoothly, promising to spur economic development, end the Iraq war and implement a universal health care system, and challenging Obama to an unmoderated debate.

So how should the New York senator’s box score read? 4 for 5 with one strikeout? Or should that be marked an error?

Unfortunately, the final score in this game won’t be known until May 6, when Hoosiers head to the polls.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.  

Photo: Frank Polich - Hillary Clinton campaigns in South Bend, Indiana.

Journalists and staffers “bowl” tennis balls down the aisle of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign plane as it takes off from Gary, Indiana, on Friday night.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton stopped in a sports bar in Gary, Indiana, on Friday, but these two customers who shook her hand said that wasn’t necessarily enough to win their votes.

EAST CHICAGO, Ind. - Democratic presidential candidates have held more than 20 debates. Evidently that’s not enough for Hillary Clinton.

Clinton is pressing her final rival, Barack Obama, to debate her in Indiana and North Carolina, which hold their primary contests on May 6.

Either state would be fine, but both would be better, Clinton said on Friday.

“I’ll go anywhere and anytime. And we’ll have that debate as long as Senator Obama will agree to actually meet me,” Clinton said Friday morning in Jacksonville, North Carolina.

“I think the people of Indiana deserve a debate,” she told WFIE TV in Evansville, Indiana, several hours later. “We should be up there answering questions that are important to Hoosiers.”

This is a classic page from the underdog’s political playbook, last deployed by Republican Mike Huckabee before he conceded to John McCain in March.

If Obama accepts the challenge, he shares a stage with a rival that most political observers believe has little chance of winning the Democratic nomination. If he declines, he risks looking cowardly or disengaged.

The Obama campaign said it was not interested in more debates.

“While Senator Clinton is focused on debating debates … Senator Obama is focused on finding real solutions for our families,” spokesman Hari Sevugan said in an e-mail. “The difference in this election couldn’t be more clear.”

The two last met in Philadelphia last week, before that state gave Clinton a much-needed victory.

An April 27 debate in North Carolina was canceled by state party officials who cited logistical reasons.

Obama had agreed to participate in that debate while Clinton had not, Sevugan said.

Photo credit: Reuters/John Gress (Hillary Clinton campaigns in Indianapolis)